5 decades on
Last week I paid a brief visit for the day to Market Drayton in Shropshire, my home town. In the forty years since I left it has changed gradually but inexorably. For instance, its current population is now nearly 12,000, compared with 7,000 when I left the town for university in the early 1970s.
Going through the family photograph albums, I came across this 1965 photograph of Market Drayton’s Salisbury Road, where the family used to live. We actually spent 10 years there in total and my youngest sibling Andrew was born at home at 87 Salisbury Road.
You’ll see 2 boys standing by the lamppost outside no. 87; of these I’m the one on the right. I believe the other lad is Adrian Clarke who used to live round the corner. Note the complete absence of motor cars. A minority of working class people living in council houses (for that is what they were/are. Ed.) owned motor vehicles in those days, or seemed to. I believe at the time the picture was taken my late father had only recently acquired a moped to travel to work, having hung up his bicycle clips. The row of council houses shown was relatively new when the above photograph was taken, only having been built some 5 years earlier; I can recall the back gardens being levelled by bulldozer when we first moved in in 1960. Some of these houses are now privately owned and are currently changing hands for well over £100,000 as Drayton is a popular place for people to live while commuting to work in Shrewsbury, Telford or the Potteries.
Now here’s a picture of the same road from roughly the same spot 5 decades on.
Note the increase in the number of motor vehicles evident – 8 in all – and the increased number of lampposts – from 1 in the 1960s to 3 now.
Did you live in Salisbury Road or Market Drayton in the 1960s? Perhaps you still live there. Anyway, leave your memories in the comments below.